Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb

by Carolyn Jourdan

  “Oh,” she said, pursing her lips as she glanced over her shoulder. She swiveled her chair so her back was to her boss’s door.

  “Anything you’re willin to tell me?” he said speaking quietly.

  The girl whispered, “Is he in trouble?”

  “He might be,” Henry said, leaning in so he could whisper, too.

  “Good. Cause he’s a sleaze ball.”

  “Oh really?” Henry said, leaning even closer. “Do tell.”

  She thought for a moment, then said, “He likes people to think he’s just a boring old fart, but he’s mean as hell. A predator. And a bully.”

  Henry raised his eyebrows.

  “The word is that Ph.D. candidates around him have a tendency to drop out without getting a degree, several of them after completing all the course work and turning in dissertations. Nobody seems to know why. Whatever’s going on there, so far he’s been able to cover his tracks.

  “He’s been divorced several times, prob’ly because he chases women students. His ex-wives hate him and are after him for unpaid alimony. Lotsa people call here complainin about delays in us depositing his salary checks. But that’s some cock ‘n bull story he’s givin out,” she whispered so softly he was nearly lip reading.

  Anything else she’d been about to say was prevented by the entrance of a short, balding man who stepped out of the inner office and said, “Jolene, this is a place of business, not a night club.”

  Then he turned to Henry, who was still leaning close to the girl, and said in an unfriendly tone, “May I help you?”

  It was obvious that Henry wouldn’t be getting any useful information from the Dean, and the girl’s sudden stiffening made him cautious, so he winked at her and said, “Not unless you can make this sweet thing go out with me.”

  Then before the Dean had time to throw him out, he left, waving a friendly goodbye to Jolene.

  Henry wandered the halls until he found a door that said “Mycology Lab.” Three young people walked by carrying trays of bark with oozing growths on them. There were two men and a woman. He followed them inside.

  After they’d set their trays down, he asked, “Any of you folks have classes with Whittington?”

  His authoritative looks and the way he left off the Professor’s title made them curious.

  “I do,” said the guy who was wearing a baseball cap.

  “I’m tryin to find out whatever you’re willin to tell me about him.”

  None of the students said anything.

  “I don’t need to know your names,” Henry said. “And what you tell me won’t go any further. I know he isn’t what he seems.”

  The three exchanged looks, then the woman spoke, “He’s a creep,” she said. “Always hitting on the women. If you say no, he acts like he was just kidding, but then you get a bad grade.”

  “He’s notorious for using students as research assistants and then stealing their work,” said the taller of the men. “Everybody knows he does it, but nothing’s ever done to stop him. I mean, lots of the profs do that, it’s sort of how things work at a university, but, he’s the worst. And when he’s confident he won’t get caught, he’s ruthless. Just ask some of the people he’s used and then forced out of the doctoral program.”

  “Yeah, he acts sorta geeky, like he’s absent-minded, but it’s fake,” said the young man in the baseball cap. “He knows exactly what he’s doing. Students are afraid of him, but you don’t dare challenge him.”

  “Can you show me Ivy Iverson’s lab area?”

  “Sure,” said the young woman. “It’s over here.”

  She showed Henry how to read the labels on the boxes and the four of them looked through Ivy’s specimens and papers, but saw nothing that bore a recent date.

  “I know she’s been going out a lot lately and collecting,” said the student with the baseball cap. “I don’t understand why her specimens aren’t here.”

  “Where else might she keep them?” Henry asked.

  The young man shrugged.

  “Let me rephrase that,” said Henry. “If you were gonna hide somethin you were workin on, how would you do it?”

  “You can hide a myxo in plain sight and nobody would think anything about it,” the taller man said. “Unless they were an expert, and even then it’s hard to tell exactly what you’ve got.”

  “Where else might she keep specimens?” Henry asked.

  “Jameson Knob,” the young woman said. “I think she may have been working out of the research station at there. Maybe she’s keeping her recent stuff there.”

  Henry knew the place. It was a large tract of mountaintop land with a modern house on it donated to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park by a philanthropic family. The house had recently been remodeled to provide living quarters and lab space for use by visiting scientists. The place was not used much, especially in the winter, because it was hard to get to. It was on the North Carolina side of the mountain at the end of a tough drive.

  Henry thanked the students and left the lab.

  He’d gotten what he came for. Now he had enough information to formulate a picture. Professor Whittington was a bully, a womanizer, a thief, a liar, and heavily in debt. In other words, a Grade A sociopath and a highly motivated criminal. What he didn’t know was the connection was between the Professor and Ivy’s disappearance, if any.

  But perhaps a visit to Jameson Knob would fill in some of the blanks.

  Chapter 33

  Although neither of them realized it, while Henry was at the main campus off Cumberland Avenue, Phoebe was just across the river at the University of Tennessee Hospital, next door to the world famous Body Farm.

  She’d decided to take a few more hours off work and have a chat with an old friend, Professor Charles Goldman, M.D.

  Charlie, a radiologist, was usually to be found somewhere in the vast windowless basement of the hospital because that was where the radioactive materials and devices were kept. It was a rabbit warren where most of the rooms were maintained in an eternal twilight to make it easier to read the myriad kinds of ghostly images the radiology department worked with: MRIs, MRAs, CT and PET scans, ultrasonic and fluoroscopic images, bone scans, and the so-called plain films, which weren’t actually on film anymore.

  Phoebe didn’t want to use a cell phone inside a hospital, so she called Charlie’s pager from the public phone that hung on the wall in the main lobby. From where she stood she could see the double doors marking the entrance to the Radiology Department.

  When his pager answered, she punched in the number she was calling from and hung up. She stood next to the phone and less than a minute later it rang. “Hey, Charlie, it’s Phoebe. I’m in the lobby, but I think this is about as far as I can make it without gettin lost. Do you mind comin to get me?”

  Charlie laughed and said, “Smart move, I’m in one of the new reading rooms we’ve made since we’ve gotten computerized. You’d never be able to find me. It’s one of the great things about this job. So many places to hide!”

  It took nearly ten minutes for Charlie to appear at the double doors. He was easy to recognize even though she hadn’t seen him in a few years. He was slightly over six feet tall with curly, prematurely silver hair and dark blue eyes. His coloring and starched white lab coat were perfectly suited to the silvery world he worked in. It was radiological camo.

  He intentionally cultivated a professorial look with a closely trimmed white beard, but he was so muscular he ended up looking like a cross between Sigmund Freud and a pro football player instead. Charlie’s beeper went off before he had time to greet Phoebe. He looked down at it and said, “Do you mind coming with me?”

  Phoebe was happy to go with him. She loved getting to see all the images and watch him help other doctors figure out what was going on with a patient.

  “What’s up?” he asked, as they walked into the netherworld.

  “I need some information on an impossibly obscure topic,” she said.

  “Ever
hear of Google?” he asked.

  “You’re more fun,” she said. Charlie was a genius who read nearly everything and remembered most of it.

  “And the topic is?”

  “Slime.”

  “When the topic of slime comes up, you think of me?” he said. “I’m not sure I should be flattered.”

  “You’re the smartest guy I know.”

  “Oh, well then. That makes it okay,” he said, smiling.

  Phoebe gave him a quick overview of the information she had on the missing student and why she wanted to understand more about Myxomycetes. “So what can you tell me?” she asked.

  “Hmmm,” he said, thinking, as he punched in the code to a lock. He held the door open and gestured for her to go in ahead of him. She didn’t recognize the room. The last time she’d watched him work, he’d been reading images printed on actual film. Clearly, that was now passé. She scanned the room for images to get an indication about which particular reading room they were in, such as ER, ICU, or Neonatal, but there were no wall-mounted light boxes with X-rays anymore.

  There were several desk areas partitioned off just enough to block the light, but not enough to make them into separate cubicles. Each one had a rolling office chair and two computer monitors rotated 90° from normal so the long axis was vertical. He pulled a chair over for her, then sat down and logged in to the computer.

  She loved to sit beside him as he read. The images of the human body were, to her, the most beautiful art gallery in the world. Charlie started talking and it took her a moment to realize he was answering her question and not dictating his findings pertaining to the image on the computer screen. The radiology department computers were set up for voice recognition and the switch to turn it on was handheld, so in the dark conversation could get confusing if she didn’t pay close attention to whether he was speaking to her or the machine.

  “… the most important thing is that for their own protection some of them can produce and emit chemicals that will kill bacteria in their immediate environment. We humans noticed this defensive trick of theirs and learned to harvest and then synthesize the chemicals they create so we can use them to kill bacteria in people.”

  Charlie was accustomed to talking to himself in the dark, so he continued to run on without needing any prompting.

  “Because of this, there’s a renewed interest in checking out what’s growing in the woods. You can get a Ph.D. these days in the finding or testing of novel biological chemical compounds. It’s called bio-prospecting.

  “And of course we’ve got a doozy of a hunting preserve right here in the Smokies because the place is a temperate rainforest, or cloudforest, or fogforest, depending on which area of the park you’re in. Although a tropical rainforest is the best for many kinds of biological growth, a temperate jungle happens to better for myxomycetes.”

  Phoebe nodded. She’d known Charlie would be a font of information, but it was still amazing what the guy knew.

  “And we’ve got extreme diversity of life forms here because our mountains run northeast and southwest. Species weren’t eradicated by the Ice Age in this area like they were in the Alps and Himalayas where the mountains run east and west.

  “In the Smokies plants and animals could advance and retreat as they needed to, so they were able survive. They didn’t get trapped by a glacier and obliterated against the side of a mountain range like they did in many parts of the world.

  “Give me a second,” he said, leaning forward and typing with two fingers. An image of a torso appeared on the screen and he concentrated on it, manipulating it so he could view it from different angles. Phoebe was awestruck by the exotic rotations, slices, and animations the new digital imaging software was capable of.

  Charlie dictated his findings in a rapid monotone. He spoke with a strong local accent, like Phoebe did, and she was amused to see that sometimes there were errors in the text as it appeared on the screen if he pronounced a word in standard English. The software didn’t recognize it and he’d have to go back and say it again with an accent.

  Phoebe laughed and said, “Jethro.” That was the nickname his classmates had given him in medical school.

  He turned and smiled at her. “The system is programmed to identify the speaker from the login information,” he explained, “and to transcribe what we’re saying. It pulls the examples we’ve loaded to train it to understand our particular way of talking. It can interpret the distinctive speech patterns of each of the radiologists who work here. I have to remember to maintain a consistent accent for it to work properly. I can’t straddle two worlds in here, even though I have to as soon as I leave the room.”

  “Well, Jethro,” Phoebe said, “I’m awful glad you chose the hillbilly world for your speech recognition. You’re strikin a blow for hicks everywhere.”

  “Thank you,” he said, bowing his head to accept her praise.

  She sighed and said, “Now here’s the hard question. Whaddya think’s goin on if you gotta a girl in the Ph.D. program who loves to climb tall trees and study slime, and all of a sudden she goes missin?”

  “Is there evidence of foul play?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ruled out the significant other?”

  “Let’s say so for the sake of this discussion.”

  “Then I’d say the kid’s found something valuable in the tree canopy and one of the experts she’s in communication with knows what she found and wants it for themselves.”

  Phoebe was amazed at his immediate and specific suspicion, but knew better than to dispute him.

  “This is not a field very many people can navigate,” he said, “even to steal each other’s work. It requires a great deal of academic know-how to test the specimens. And then it takes a biochemist who can synthesize commercial amounts of the chemical compound discovered in nature before you can sell it.”

  “What’s the most valuable thing she could’ve found?” Phoebe asked. “I mean somethin valuable enough to make somebody want to kill her over it?”

  Charlie thought about it, then said, “If I had to guess, I’d say she’s discovered a naturally-occurring antibiotic, possibly one capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier.”

  “What’s the blood-brain barrier?”

  “It’s a great mystery,” he said, turning toward her in the dark. “The human body is extraordinarily complex. It’s not just a container where things slosh around together. It’s full of discrete zones that are separated from one another. Substances aren’t free to move from one place to another because that would be dangerous. For example, stomach acid needs to stay in the stomach. And there are sequestered organ systems, like the brain and spinal cord.

  “An antibiotic pill that works well on lots of things won’t necessarily treat a brain infection. There are filters in the body that carefully strain whatever gets into the brain or the cerebrospinal fluid. Many antibiotics can’t make it through this filtering system, so they’re useless to treat brain infections.

  “These chemically-sequestered areas of the body are fascinating. You discover how unusual they are when you get a physical injury, a traumatic intrusion that breaches the barrier between these separated areas, so the rest of the body encounters it for the first time.

  “Our immune systems keep a molecular memory of every type of body molecule to prevent them from attacking anything they recognize as a part of you, but when a new type of molecule comes on the scene that they haven’t run into before, like when you have a cold or flu, they attack it.

  “If lymphocytes encounter body parts that they don’t have in their inventory list of acceptable molecules, they will engineer an attack on it. Unfortunately, this means when you get a traumatic exposure of a sequestered body part, like falling and getting a stick jammed into your eye, the immune response can go wrong and produce unexpected collateral damage to the normal eye.

  “Immunologically the body will not be able to reliably recognize as its own some of the chemical components o
f the interior of the eye or of the testicles and this can result in peculiar outcomes after injuries to these areas. The body’s immune cells mistake eye or testicle components as foreign invaders and attack not only the injured part, but also the normal part.

  “So a surgeon might have to remove an injured eye or testicle before the unwanted autoimmune response can begin, in order to save the uninjured side.”

  “Good grief,” Phoebe said, “that’s amazing and horrible. I never knew that.”

  “It’s interesting, but it’s not really what you asked me. I got off the subject. You asked about high value botanical discoveries.

  “Right now, about the highest value discovery would be an antibiotic that could treat tuberculous meningitis. That’s a tuberculosis that can infect the membranes that envelop the central nervous system.

  “There’s a fierce, antibiotic-resistant strain erupting in India that nothing can treat. We have no truly effective medicine for it. It’s scary. Any new antibiotics that might help with that would be priceless.

  “So, my money’s on a fellow student, or professor, or a biochemist who wants to take credit for identifying a hot new antibiotic that works in a sequestered organ system. I’d bet on the kid’s professor.”

  “Why are you so suspicious of him?”

  “It takes one to know one,” Charlie said.

  “Criminals?” she asked.

  “Professors.”

  Chapter 34

  It was late in the afternoon by the time Waneeta was able to get in touch with Phoebe. She wanted to have an undisturbed conversation, so she sent Bruce far, far away, this time by fabricating a story about a disgruntled local family, upset about the denial of coverage for an expensive experimental treatment to save their momma.

  Bruce was deeply afraid of the local people. He worked in a rural area and was employed to care for the people there, but he lived in West Knoxville in a gated urban enclave with other non-natives. He dashed to and from work as quickly as possible without stopping until well within the perceived safe zones of the city.